It's probably too late but is there any chance of having the charity entered also under the "at-risk" youth category? It seems like if you're in that category you get extra chances to win money.

The reason why I think the charity could qualified is because Aviva defines 'at risk' as

"This year, Aviva is awarding up to $150,000 to ideas that support our Street-to-School initiative, which aims to help vulnerable young people who are at risk of being exposed to violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, prostitution, health issues, a lack of education or fewer career options."

(http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/about/at-risk-youth)

Certainly young people with ME/CFS have health issues and because of that they are at risk for "lack of education" (miss out on school, can't do all activities, etc.) and, down the line, "fewer career options." A UK study by the Tymes trust showed that ME/CFS is the #1 cause of long-term school absence from health issues in the K-12 group. And there are economic studies estimating that kids who have chronic illnesses feel the impact on their careers/ education for the rest of their lives even after they get better due to prime years lost. There's an economic paper on ME/CFS commenting on this too. Anyhow, if we can't do it this time, consider for next time.

Cute ad. It just gave me an idea. How about this? We could offer the services (non-voluntary basis) of one Dr. Weasel for your very own private therapy session if you don't vote! That should get the votes pouring in. Just might find a way to put the guy to good use after all.

I chcecked the results of the best 20 organisations in our category. Just be carefull because sometimes it doesnt show the good numbers. I chcecked it in the time when americans start to wake up slowly (around 6 a.m.) so it means that during the day we will a bit lose our position because we have a lot of european and australian voters. here are the results:

I would do a small analyse. Our results are not pesimistic but also not optimistic. We are only 250 votes behind the 10 th place but also other organisations are not far away from us. if you look at other organisations there are a lot of kids organisations and how we could already see it - the kids are able to bring thousands of votes in the last day. so we should try to catch at least 7-8 position and the gap is already around 900 votes. it´s not a lot but we have to do something now to change it because every day it will be more difficult. We already did a lot of commercial and we can continue but it doesnt bring us significant number of new voters. i think we have 2 possibilities. 1. to try to contact a big ME, fibromyalgia, Lyme,...organisation from our kind of diseas and ask them to make a big call to their members. If we post a promotion on a page it brings only few votes - it has to be someone from that community. 2. to try to find some kids organisations from our area and ask them to vote for us.
I think without this we will not be sucessfull. So any suggestions are welcome.

I wonder if the problem is people think they only need to vote ONCE. The reason I say this is that we have 3,258 supporters but we only have 4,163 votes. If each supporter voted more than once, shouldn't we have somewhere around 6,400 instead? It's possible some people only started voting yesterday but this would be balanced somewhat by people like me who've voted everyday.